What is smartd?

[Tom Diehl]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Randy Kelsoe wrote:

> Tom Diehl wrote:
> 
> >>Mine fails as well. I don't have any IDE disks in my machine. I have 2
> >>SATA drives and 1 IDE dvd-rom and 1 IDE dvd-ram drive. Would I be okay
> >>disabling this service as well?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Bottom line is you do not need smartd. Having said that, if your devices support
> >it, IMO you should run it. If properly setup (and enabled in the BIOS) it can
> >give you warnings of impending disk failure. There are numerous links available
> >via google that will explain this better than I can. Try googleing for smartd.
> >  
> >
> 
> Actually, smart does not need to be enabled in BIOS. If it is enabled in 
> BIOS, the BIOS will check the smart status of the drive on boot up, and 
> if it finds a problem, it may disable or ignore the drive. smartd will 
> still work if smart is disabled in BIOS.

Yes, you are correct. I found this info about 5 minutes after I sent the above.

> 
> >Smartd will for sure monitor smart enabled SCSI disks. I do not know about
> >SATA but since this is a new technology my guess would be that it will monitor
> >them as well. IIRC, there was also a series of articles in Linux Journal a few
> >months back on this.
> >
> 
> If the drive is on a SATA controller that is using libata, smart will 
> not work (yet). If the drive is using IDE mode, and the drive is 
> supported, it should work.
> 
> http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/#testinghelp

Tom